Come to Problem Day this Friday, October 4th and engage with student and physician entrepreneurs who will be going through the Sling Health accelerator this year. Problem Day 2019 will kickoff Sling Health STL’s 8th cycle and serve as the platform by which our 25 Project Leaders will recruit >100 students to their team around the clinical problems they have chosen. Register for the event here: bit.ly/SHProblemDay19Cal

Note: If you are unable to make it to Problem Day, but are interested in joining a team, don't worry! Apply to Sling Health here! As the event approaches, please come back to our website to take a look at who the project leaders are and what problems they are interested in.

Sling Health STL, WashU’s student-run healthcare startup incubator, is seeking to create a culture within our program that is more inclusive and that attracts students from diverse backgrounds. To help us expand our student outreach and enrich our program, we are recruiting a passionate Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Chair to lead and implement Sling Health STL diversity initiatives.

APPLY NOW: Applications are due Friday, February 15th at 11:59 p.m. CST.

This is a fantastic opportunity to hone your leadership and communications skills, build relationships across organizations within and outside of WashU, and make an impact! No prior medical/healthcare or entrepreneurial experience is required.

The DEI Chair’s key responsibilities may include but will not be limited to identifying and implementing best practices/processes for diversity recruitment, retention, and training, as well as building relationships with affinity groups and appropriate stakeholder groups on- and off-campus to promote diversity for Sling Health STL.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the DEI Chair role or the application process, please contact Aadit Shah at aadit@stl.slinghealth.org. Please forward this role to anyone you think might be interested!

ABOUT SLING HEALTH STL: Sling Health STL, formerly IDEA Labs, is a non-profit healthcare accelerator founded and run by WashU students that provides resources, training, and mentorship to interdisciplinary teams of students to develop and commercialize solutions to clinical problems discovered by healthcare providers.

SAINT LOUIS—Interdisciplinary teams from Sling Health’s St. Louis chapter will compete in The Future of Biomedical Innovation: Startup Pitch Competition from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. CST on January 31 at CIC@4240 – Havana Room in the Cortex District during Venture Café, a weekly networking meetup for local startups. Participating student alumni teams from 2017 and 2018 will pitch their healthcare solutions, ranging from data analytics software to apps and LED kits, and present their business plans to a panel of judges.

The first-place and second-place winning teams will be announced at the end of the event and will be awarded $5,000 and $3500, respectively. The audience will subsequently get the chance to vote for and recognize a third team. The event is open to the public and attendees are invited to mingle with Sling Health representatives and others at Venture Café afterward.

“The pitch competition is an exciting event for Sling Health,” said Kavon Javaherian, Sling Health STL president. “We are thrilled to showcase our most recent alumni teams and their innovations to the entrepreneurial community.”

The pitch competition is just one component of Sling Health STL’s nine-month experiential platform. As the founding chapter of the national Sling Health network, the organization enables students across the St. Louis area to develop skills in entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation by forming project teams and developing and implementing solutions to specific healthcare problems. Several Sling Health STL alumni project teams have become revenue-generating businesses in the St. Louis community.

The platform culminates annually in Demo Day, Sling Health’s flagship event. Throughout Demo Day, all student teams present their final innovations to entrepreneurs, clinicians and investors through poster and pitch competitions to earn financial prizes from Sling Health and jumpstart the transition to becoming fully-fledged companies. This year’s Demo Day will take place from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. CST on April 13 at CIC@4240.

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ABOUT SLING HEALTH STL:Sling Health STLis a non-profit healthcare accelerator founded in 2013 by WashU students that provides an entrepreneurial platform through resources, training, and mentorship to interdisciplinary teams of students to develop and commercialize solutions to clinical problems discovered by healthcare providers. For more information, please visit www.stl.slinghealth.org.

The BJC HealthCare/Washington University School of Medicine Health Systems Innovation Lab is joining forces with Sling Health to foster innovations in health care delivery and create new mentorship opportunities for entrepreneurial students.

Sling Health, formerly IDEA Labs, is a student-run biotechnology accelerator with the dual aim of developing student entrepreneurs and successful businesses that can revolutionize medicine.

Weaving together the innovation lab’s resources and mentorship with Sling Health’s interdisciplinary student innovators and educational program, the two organizations will provide new opportunities for students and physicians to imagine and implement innovations in health care delivery, quality and efficiency.

“While Sling Health has historically tackled problems drawn directly from clinicians, leading to exciting device and digital health innovations, this new partnership will enable student entrepreneurs to take a step farther and address larger, systemwide problems in health care delivery,” said Kavon Javaherian, Sling Health president.

The focus will be on further inspiring innovation in the lab’s key strategic areas of:

The Health Systems Innovation Lab will provide Sling Health with insight and access to innovation opportunities in BJC/WUSM communities that speak to these strategic areas. Sling Health teams will use these insights to form project teams and design care delivery innovations targeting these opportunities. During Sling’s nine-month incubation cycle, the lab will afford teams targeting these problems with specialized mentorship to help them develop their ideas and companies. At the completion of the incubation cycle, promising innovations will be reviewed by the lab for further development.

“One of the greatest resources that our community has is its bright, motivated students seeking to make a positive difference in the health and health care of our patients,” said Thomas Maddox, MD, director of the Health Systems Innovation Lab and a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine. “The lab looks forward to supporting the efforts of Sling Health to harness the talents of these students to develop novel ways of delivering health care.”

A key resource Sling Health offers its teams is a window into a physician's day-to-day practice and the barriers they face to properly deliver care, said Aadit Shah, Sling Health vice president. “Through this collaboration, we hope to provide teams with not only the perspective of clinicians but that of large health care systems," Shah said.

Sling Health’s first event in fall 2018 will be Problem Day, when team formation occurs from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center on the Washington University Medical Campus. Contact Sling Health at info@stl.slinghealth.org for more information.